xml-dev - More Parsers Questions

["Brown, Bryan" <bryanb@upshot.com>]

I have written a parser and I am trying to check it's conformance using the
oasis XML conformance suite. Some of the test are confusing to me

Question 1. Test '../sun/valid/ext01.xml' 
This test is supposed to be a valid document but the the document includeds
the entity null, which doesn't exist. This implies to me that if a parser
sees a reference to an external entity and it can not locate that entity
then it is to assume the entity's replacement text is empty and not issue
anything more than a warning. Is that correct ?

Question 2. Test '../sun/invalid/pe01.xml'
The document includes a reference to an external DTD 'pe01.dtd' .That
external DTD includes a "reference" to an external PE %bad-PE which since
the PE in question is not well formed should cause the parser to say the
document is invalid. This test seems wrong to me. First off the %bad-pe is
in an att-value, the XML spec says that PE's in attvalues are not recognized
(which is exactly what my parser does). Second if we ignore that and say
that well since it is in an external subset the PE reference is valid inside
an attvalue then we have a problem because it does not matter that the PE
does not match the markupdecl production as it is just being pushed onto the
inputStream in place of the PE reference, which implies the document is
valid. Also XML experts have told me that a parser can locate PEs in
external subsets by checking for a PE wherever the production S can occur,
which is not the case for attValue. I'mvery confused on this one, am I
misunderstanding the replacement of PEs in external subsets completely ?

Bryan

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